The concept of using Google’s indexing technology on your own machine is an attractive one. The interface is so familiar to most that it’s like second nature, and the idea that you could search for something and see both local and web results combined is novel, and potentially highly beneficial since it is likely that local documents can assist in the formulation of better queries, so the process of relevance feedback is enhanced.

In it’s current beta form, Google Desktop doesn’t integrate with the two main applications that I use for communications (Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird). Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Outlook have a shoddy security record and I value the data on my computer, so I avoid them diligently.

So, these web and mail applications both use and display information of standard format. Thunderbird stores downloaded mail in Unix MBox format, so being able to read Thunderbird mail would instantly avail Google Desktop of millions of Unix (and Linux) users, who’d otherwise be ignored. There is a lot of mileage in supporting these formats, and supporting them early. You can influence Google’s development path by voting for features you’d like to see.

The insight given to us by Google’s decision to concentrate on the MS products is that Google’s strategy has nothing to do with standards compliance, or security; nor are they overly concerned with ignoring the open-source community, for now. What it boils down to is this: Google have a healthy concern for their competition.

Google’s main competitor in this market segment will be Microsoft, without question. There may be other players, but they too will list MS as their main rival.

To beat MS, Google need to get ahead now, because once MS (eventually) release WinFS, it will be on every machine that runs Windows, so Google must have won hearts and minds by that time, or the game is over, and MS will have again been able to take advantage of their monopoly in the OS market to enter another market in a position of dominance.